Testwise: Understanding Educational Assessment, Volume 1

Testwise: Understanding Educational Assessment offers a 360-degree guided tour of its subject. Both volumes in this comprehensive two-volume set explore different aspects of investigating what students have learned. To set the scene, Volume One highlights recurrent themes and the contemporary context. With roots in both academic traditions and the natural sciences, today's achievement testing reaches beyond the classroom to figure in policies aimed at educational reform and societal change. How do the ways in which we assess learning reflect values in our culture? What roles do citizens, educators, government officials, and measurement professionals play? Against this background, Volume One then lays out the fundamental principles in assessment. As the central chapters explain validity, reliability, fairness, and the language of scores, they illuminate key challenges and difficult tradeoffs associated with matters of technical quality. In helping the reader understand current issues in testing and evaluate actual tests, Testwise also puts assessment of learning in a new light. It is a process of critical thinking, reasoning from evidence, and defining the goals of education.

Table of Contents:
Chapter 1 I. The Origins of Educational Measurement: A Quest to Quantify Chapter 2 II. In the Modern Era: A Tool for Classroom and Society Chapter 3 III. Educational Assessment and National Values Chapter 4 IV. Perspectives and Directives Chapter 5 V. Validity Chapter 6 VI. Reliability Chapter 7 VII. Fairness and Accessibility Chapter 8 VIII. The Meanings and Uses of Scores

About the Author :
Nora Vivian Odendahl received a Ph.D. in English from Princeton University and worked as a test developer at Educational Testing Service for sixteen years. She specialized in writing assessment, including test design, essay scoring, and applications of technology.

Review :
In a time when the nation is facing the complexities of participatory democracy at every turn, Testwise: Understanding Educational Assessment is a most welcome touchstone. In her focus on historical and cultural contexts as they reveal the origin and development of assessment principles, Nora Vivian Odendahl has given us a stunning volume. Operating with an insider's knowledge of test development, Dr. Odendahl takes us from civil service examinations used during the Han dynasty in China to contemporary theories of cognition used to map the mind. Always and everywhere, she keeping readers firmly grounded in enduring educational questions: tensions between enforcing accountability and promoting opportunity; the requirements of large-scale testing versus the needs of individual students; and the demands of learning as they intersect with promise of educational equality. A more timely and valuable book cannot be imagined, and we are fortunate that Dr. Odendahl has given us a way to think critically about the roles of testing in our society.